Between Heaven and Hell
by Gnom DePlume
Summary: The newly dead Maitlands don't like it when Benjamin Joos moves into their home, but the other ghostly inhabitant knows just what to do to make him leave. One bio-exorcism coming right up! Modern Movieverse Role-Reversal AU, eventual BJ/Lydia
1. Prologue

A/N: I had this idea a while ago, but it sort of got stuffed in a drawer. Now that I'm working on other stories again, this one demanded I pay attention to it instead. Why does this always happen? Simultaneous posting with my other site.

* * *

"All houses wherein men have lived and died  
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors  
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,  
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

...

"The stranger at my fireside cannot see  
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;  
He but perceives what is; while unto me  
All that has been is visible and clear.

"We have no title-deeds to house or lands;  
Owners and occupants of earlier dates  
From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,  
And hold in mortmain still their old estates."

- excerpt from "Haunted Houses" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

* * *

PROLOGUE:

The deaths of Adam and Barbara Maitland caught everyone by surprise, including themselves – especially when they woke up afterwards in their partially redecorated house wondering how they got there. So the lack of a last will and testament wasn't much of a shock to anyone. At least, until Jane Butterfield found out that their estate was being auctioned off to pay for the expense of being dead instead of being entrusted to the hands of their closest kin, Jane Butterfield, who was a distant cousin on a convoluted family tree.

Disaster had been an intimate acquaintance of the Maitland family for some time, and this was only the latest in a string of tragedies.

-SCENE BREAK-

For Benjamin Joos, Winter River was supposed to be a new start. He'd spent most of his life wandering from job to job and in and out of jail cells, although they'd never actually been able to pin him down and send him to the big house. A 'handyman' by trade, he thought he'd take the opportunity to see what living on the other side was like when the chance came to snap up the Maitland Hardware store and a big house on a hill in the middle of Nowheresville. They were dead cheap, going for practically nothing, and there had to be a catch.

Well, pun intended: The locals said the house was haunted.

He could deal with that.

-SCENE BREAK-

She had given up on actually haunting a long time ago. Occasionally she would walk wistfully up and down the stairs, trailing long black scarves over the railing for effect. But for the most part she stayed in the guest bedroom working on her morose poetry, which she took the utmost care to keep hidden from the living occupants of the house, whose existence she otherwise hardly took notice of.

That is, until they came back…slightly different.

She watched, and she waited.


	2. 1: For Want of a Vacuum

Summary: The Maitlands have trouble getting used to the afterlife and meet their new roommate.

A/N: This fic is shaping up to be more like a set of interconnected scenes and drabbles than a straight-through narrative, but on the other hand that means that I can do regular updates fairly easily. To-May-To, Toe-Mah-Toe, right?

* * *

1: For Want of a Vacuum

* * *

She hadn't thought much about the Maitlands when they were alive. After a while it was a drag being invisible, and she didn't feel like terrifying them until the trauma made ignoring her impossible. She knew from previous experience that a normal human mind had a remarkable capacity for denying the strange and unusual, up to and sometimes including tap-dancing avant-garde statuary and every wall in the house oozing blood until it flooded the basement. (She had really enjoyed the intermediate interface chapter on haunting in the handbook.)

Therefore, Adam and Barbara had been more like furniture that walked and talked than actual people who required thinking about. She supposed they were a cute couple. They still acted like newlyweds after years of fruitless (but loud) attempts to have children. That was kind of sad, because they probably would have been good parents.

But aside from the occasional stint of hiding in the garage plugging her ears, she had ignored them just like they had ignored her. Now that they were dead she didn't know what to make of them. They kept trying to clean and eat and sleep and be human, not...whatever you become afterwards (it was up to you, really). Their attempts to figure out the handbook were hilariously bad. It was all so depressing.

She pressed her ear more firmly against the attic door.

"Where are all the other dead people in the world, why is it just you and me?" Barbara was asking. It sounded like a book was being flipped through.

"Maybe this is heaven," Adam suggested happily.

"In heaven there wouldn't be dust on everything."

Well, it was now or never. The attic door creaking open halted their conversation. A mop of messy black hair peeked into the room followed by the young woman herself, barefoot and wearing an old-fashioned black dress. "I can go get it for you. If you want," she said.

Startled, they traded glances and then looked back at her. "...Get what?" Adam finally said.

"I can go out to the garage if you really want your vacuum," she explained, leaning against the door frame. "My advice is to forget it, though. You've got bigger problems."

Barbara shot to her feet and began to fire off questions. "What do you mean? Where did you come from? Who are you? Are you...a ghost, too?"

"Yup. Name's Lydia. As for how I got here, I died. And I meant I could bring you your vacuum so you can clean."

They seemed to be expecting more.

"Lydia Deetz," she added. "With a D, like as in dog."

Adam shook himself, rather like the aforementioned canine, and started forward holding out his hand. Eventually, after looking from the hand to his face to the hand while he tried to follow the ping pong match, Lydia got the hint and tentatively shook it, her face bemused.

"Nice to meet you," he said. "We haven't run across any other, um, spirits."

"You wouldn't, not in the house. There's a phantom hitchhiker who shows up sometimes down by the covered bridge, though," she said. Then she shook Barbara's hand, just for the novelty of it.

That prodded Barbara into saying, "Oh! Where are my manners? Please, come in. I'm sorry for the mess, but - you probably know more about our situation than we do."

"That's right!" Adam crossed his arms and tried to look sternly over his glasses. "Young lady, were you spying on us?"

Against her will Lydia felt her sass melt into a somewhat sheepish expression. Shrugging awkwardly, she held up her thumb and forefinger a tiny bit apart. "This was my haunted house before it was yours. It's kind of hard not to," she muttered.

Recognition bloomed across Adam's face. "You're that girl? Barb, remember what the people we bought the house from told us? The owners before them had a daughter that mysteriously disappeared."

Laughing a little, Barbara nodded. "Right. And they also claimed the house is possessed by a demon, but we never had any trouble..." She trailed off and blinked.

Lydia smirked and said, "I didn't like them."


	3. 2: No Stop Signs or Speed Limit

A/N: Our favorite bad boy finally shows up - in the flesh!

This part definitely has a soundtrack and it is AC/DC's "Highway to Hell." Also I know not everybody loves it when movie fics include references to the cartoon, but I try to work it in so that it makes sense for everybody.

* * *

2: No Stop Signs or Speed Limit

Benjamin Joos drove down the winding country lane in his baby, a vintage VW Bug convertible. He'd never been able to find out what year the Dragster of Doom had been made, as it was a unique custom build in lime green with a checkered past. His car's history was almost as interesting as his own. The really interesting part, though, was that Joos could still get Doomie to run.

He fiddled with the radio to settle his nerves, not yet used to flaunting his car so openly. It was too distinctive, so he couldn't really take Doomie on jobs, even when it wasn't being temperamental and rejecting this or that refurbished engine part. But this wasn't a job. He could drive around with impunity and it wouldn't matter if the whole town knew it was him flipping them off in the car with rocket tail fins.

After coaxing the old jalopy up to the top of the hill, he sat there for a moment. Lounging in his seat (as much as it was possible to lounge in a car that didn't let you lean the chair back) he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. His face moved through a variety of aborted expressions before settling on a little frown, his lips pursed and one sharply angled eyebrow raised.

"Well, well. Ain't it...homey," he muttered to himself.

If you liked farmhouse revival, it was certainly a nice house. A big old updated Victorian. The white paint had to go. Not that he was going to paint the place. It would fall off eventually on its own, after all.

His eyes trailing over the facade caught on a second story window, where a black-clad figure had its elbows planted on the sill and a pale smudge of a face propped up on small fists. He squinted, trying to make out any detail. Whoever it was stood up and faded back into the recesses of the house.

So. That was the ghost. What a spookster. Oooo, stare creepily out the window at him some more. Yeah, he was real scared. Size said teenager. It was probably just the local kids fooling around with an empty house and playing at séances and shit.

But it was his house now. They would learn to stay away pretty quick, or it would be the last lesson they ever had. Not that he was going to kill some damn kids, he amended his thoughts quickly. Jesus, it was harder being retired than he thought.

Working quickly, he unloaded his luggage. It was just a duffle bag and some supplies, like security cameras and tripwires. On the one hand there was walking away from the business a rich and happy man, and then on the other hand there was getting really dead.

When he shut the trunk, Doomie rolled back alarmingly on the slight incline where it was parked. With a chuckle, Joos bent down to put wooden blocks under the wheels. He slapped the rear end of the car as he straightened up, and exclaimed, "I know you want to get rollin' now, but we'll go out cruisin' again before you know it, buddy."

Straightening his trucker hat, he hefted a box and started hauling everything inside.

If he had looked up a little higher, he would have seen the Maitlands watching him through the attic window. He'd Googled the previous owners, and found nothing much except for some property records and a barely functional site for their hardware store. However, among the spinning text GIFs and primary colors there had been a nauseatingly adorable picture of the happy couple. So he might have had second thoughts about moving into a place haunted by an extra pair of quaint Hicksville ghosts, what with the checkered shirt and floral print.

But probably not.


	4. 3: Voices in the Attic

A/N: Sorry, would have had this up yesterday but my email was playing crazy and stuff. This is pretty much the last bit of 'set-up' before the main event.

* * *

3: Voices in the Attic

"Adam, come quick! There's someone coming up the drive," Barbara fluttered her hand at him.

Adam hurriedly waded through the extremely cluttered attic to reach the window on the other side. "Is it a family moving in?"

"I don't know," she said, her mouth pinched.

They peered out.

"What kind of person drives a lime green...what kind of car _is_ that? A Beetle?"

"That's a lot of tools. Do you think he's just a repairman? There's no furniture."

"Should we go down?"

"Maybe we should wait for Lydia."

At that they shared a mutually exasperated look, which turned to surprise as Lydia popped up behind them. The black-clad specter tapped a finger on her mouth thoughtfully, then opened her mouth to speak. Nothing came out and the silence stretched on and on, twanging on Adam and Barbara's taut nerves.

Was this how one of Lydia's strange fugue states began? After she disappeared for days at a time, occasionally they would stumble across her motionless somewhere in the house. She might be holed up in a corner on the ceiling watching a spider spin a web. Several times they'd caught her sitting with a dripped-dry ink pen poised over a splotched piece of paper, halfway through writing a word. In the latter case, a faked cough or a footstep was enough to jolt her into vanishing the work in progress.

She wasn't blinking, she wasn't breathing. They inched closer through the towers of junk and Barbara motioned for Adam to do something. He shrugged and held up his hands helplessly, then pointed at his wife to indicate that she should do whatever it was. Silently arguing, they examined the youthful face staring off into the distance.

Just as they were starting to really worry, Lydia finally said, "I think he saw me."

* * *

-SCENE BREAK-

* * *

The inside of the place was barren. Stripped. They'd taken everything that wasn't nailed down and then come back with a pry bar. That was okay. Benjamin had a feeling the government's rented lackeys had been doing the word of interior design a favor. The previous occupants had been into wallpaper in a big way. Must've been some estate sale, ha.

What remained was livable. That's the best that could be said for it.

He might get a tarp and some cans of paint to decorate the place, and by that he meant he would arrange them like he was going to paint and tell anyone that asked that he was in the middle of a renovation.

Setting his duffle down last, he decided to inspect the ole place. The floor plan wasn't terribly defensible. Too many damn windows, too many damn doors. And - seriously? No damn cable hookups? No antenna on the roof, no dish... The hell, did they not watch TV? How did they survive without internet? What, were they still using a dial-up modem and their phone line? What kinda jerk-offs had _lived_ here?

Shaking his head, he pulled out a pack and lit up. Taking a soothing drag, he wandered upstairs. As he set foot on the landing, scuffling and weird noises erupted from the ceiling. Aw shit, were there fuckin' raccoons in the attic, too? He'd been told it was locked, sealed off. So much for that.

This was gonna take a lotta work.

Dammit.


	5. 4: Get Out While the Getting's Good

A/N: Leaving a little note here because I'm trying to be better at responding to reviews, but if you don't sign in and then ask me questions I can't reply and stuff. (Think I got back to everyone else, though?) I still love the reviews, so cheers to you! Okay, haunting time!

* * *

4: Get Out While the Getting's Good

* * *

"How dare he!" Barbara shouted, pacing back and forth in the attic. "He's turned our dining room into some kind of man cave! He keeps smoking in the house! There are beer bottles everywhere and he's knocking holes in the wall and...!"

Her face crumpled and Adam folded her into his arms, saying, "I know. I don't like it either. But it's only been one day!"

Lydia was curled up on the sofa in the corner, curiously poking at the screen of a flat electronic device the size of her palm. "I don't want to say I told you so," she said. "But this is why I told you to hide everything you really cared about."

"We tried," Adam protested.

"But everything we could put up here is just mementos, our photos, things that we could move. This is our house that he's destroying!" Barbara cried.

Adam added, "We can't hide our whole house."

Lydia knew that they really couldn't help it. The house was their anchor. That didn't make their attachment less annoying. The much older ghost sighed a little but didn't say anything, and the beep bop boop music drifted through the echoing rafters.

"Lydia. Lydia!"

She looked up.

He asked, "Can we? Hide our house?"

"Not really." She was turning the thing around and around in her hands. It looked like she had been playing a game with little green pigs and angry birds. With a wicked gleam in her eye, she said, "We only have one option."

"And...what is that?" Adam asked naively.

"You guys are such Luddites. It's his cell phone." A playful smile pulled up one corner of her mouth.

"No, he means, what should we do? But...while we're on the subject, when did you take that? I thought we were going to just watch until we know - "

"That we hate his guts?" Lydia interrupted Barbara. She looked very seriously at each of them in turn. "Adam. Barbara. It's time to put up or shut up. We're going to make him leave, of course."

"How? I know you think he's different, but no one else can see us. Not Jane, not the movers, not anyone!"

Sometimes they were adorably clueless, but this was just dense. "By scaring him mostly dead. Duh. And we'll start," she said holding up the phone, "with this."

The Maitlands exchanged uneasy glances, speaking to each other without words. "...Mostly dead?" Adam ventured.

"Yeah," Lydia said matter-of-factly. "All dead and we'd never get rid of him."

-SCENE BREAK-

Snores reverberated from the mound of sheets piled on a mattress without a frame.

Lydia floated over the chaotic mess of clothes on the floor. Leaning down to put the cell phone on the milk crate beside the makeshift bed, she had to stop, frowning. Just as she cleared enough room among the magazines, cups, junk food wrappers, and other assorted debris to put it down, a hand clamped onto her wrist.

Startled, she went intangible, dropping the phone and sliding out of the iron grip. The device fell on the floor with a crack.

"You better not have broken it," Benjamin growled in a sleep-roughened voice. He had the phone in his hand a second later. When the screen lit up in the darkened room it nearly blinded him. In an incredulous voice he read the message flashing across it over and over. "Get. Out."

He peered at her from under sardonic blonde eyebrows at where she lingered, her other hand rubbing the wrist he was sure he'd had a firm hold on.

His skin had been deliciously warm. Warmer than she remembered anything being in a long time. It made her...hungry.

"That the best you could do?" he asked. After a slow perusal of the way bending strained the buttons over her chest, he tacked on, "Sweetheart."

Caught off guard, Lydia blurted out the first thing that came to mind. "I thought it was pretty good, considering I've never even seen a smart phone in person before."

"Uh...huh. Really," he said with a little mocking headshake. He was pushing and tapping on it to try to clear the slightly cracked screen. Brow furrowing when nothing worked, he snarled, "What the hell'd you do?!"

Shrugging, she drifted a little closer to get a better view. Her hand slowly reached out without her volition, her fingers clenching and unclenching. Even from a foot away she could feel the heat radiating off him. "Hit it with my mojo," she said absently.

He slapped her hand away. Or tried to, because the strike passed straight through. Staring at her wide-eyed in the silver glow of his cell phone, he finally noticed something and stuttered out, "You - the fuck! You're fucking floating!"

"No shit, Sherlock," she retorted. Her black gaze never wavering from his, she tilted her head to the side and stuck her fingers through his ribs to feel his racing heart skip a beat.

That's when Barbara hissed through the cracked-open door, "What's taking so long?" Leaning into the room, she gasped and exclaimed, "Lydia! What are you doing?!"

The ghost in question jerked her hand out guiltily and fled through the floor, leaving Benjamin to stare in shuddering bewilderment at the innocuous-looking woman crouched in the doorway. They made eye contact.

Pointing at herself, she haltingly said, "You can see me?"

"What the fuck?" he shouted, clutching at his aching chest.

Barbara scrambled to her feet and glared at him. "We're ghosts! And we want you out of our house! So watch your language, mister!"

He slumped back against his pillow nest and said weakly, "Fuck me."

"I'll have you know I'm married!" She slammed the door shut behind her as she left.

Warily, he surveyed his bedroom, moving just his eyes. The only thing that was out of place was his phone, which had gone missing earlier that day. Looking at it again, he saw that the 'get out, get out' that flashed across it continuously was now moving faster and faster.

The message suddenly dissolved into pixilated noise and strangely, he could see a tiny figure that seemed to be shuffling out of the distance in the middle of the screen. As it got closer, the figure resolved into a bloody and mangled girl with long black hair straggling over her face and a torn black dress. Her bare feet left bright red footprints behind her.

The phone started sparking and smoking.

The girl pressed her hands on the screen and bent it outwards, trying to climb out. Locking fawn brown eyes with him, she mouthed two silent words. Get. Out.

The phone burst into unholy purple flames.

With a girlish shriek he dropped it on the mattress and groped around for something to put it out. Seizing a half-full cup nearby, he dumped the contents on the fire and nearly jumped out of his skin when the beer exploded in a foot-high pillar of light and heat.

"Aw, fuck!"

Finally he grabbed a pillow and smothered the blaze. Cautiously lifting the pillow, he was relieved to find the phone was a mass of distorted, blackened wreckage, because that meant it was not still on fire. With a scowl, he let the pillow fall back over the mess.

Well. That seemed to be it for tonight. Color him impressed. Utterly exhausted, he rolled over and went back to sleep.

-SCENE BREAK-

Stomping up the stairs, Barbara burst into the attic.

Adam turned around from messing with his model, trying to arrange enough room in the crowded space so that he could work on it. "How'd it go?"

"That...!" She spluttered. "That man is a pervert! He had Lydia's hand down his shirt! And...and..."

"So he saw you two?"

"Yes!"

"Huh." Doing a few mental calculations, Adam hesitantly asked, "Are you sure you don't mean he had his hand down...?"

"No! Lydia had her hand down his robe. And he said..." She went over and whispered into Adam's ear.

"I see." He took off his glasses and started polishing them, a hard look in his eye. "I think it's time we took matters into our own hands."


	6. 5: A Very Bad Day All Around

A/N: I can't believe I've kept up a weekly update schedule this long! Hooray for me, but next week's may be delayed because of Real Life, jobness, and less writing time.

In other news, I'm glad that Lydia came across as creepy. I have a hard time writing proper horror with Beej, he never wants to cooperate. Also, don't worry - Juno will still show up later, but I figure she can't be the only caseworker. As for Doomie, I decided that instead of retconning the nickname into something cooler for a grown man to use, I'd just hang a lampshade on it.

* * *

5: A Very Bad Day All Around

* * *

Lydia sprawled in the red leather seat of the Beetle, propping her feet up on the dashboard. In barely the blink of her eye the stars flew across the sky and gave way to the first rays of dawn peeking over the trees.

She held up her right hand to watch the sun rise through it. For the hundredth time, she examined the mark on her wrist and the flush slowly creeping back down out of her fingertips. Pink and blue and host of living colors stood out starkly against the rest of her milk white skin. She knew from experience that it should have faded completely by now. Seriously, what was going on?

Tucking her hand back into the overlong sleeve of her stolen plaid shirt, she huddled into the ghostly fabric. It wasn't the right kind of warmth, but Adam could spare it for a little while. That one jolt of living heat had made everything else feel cold, even the light of the sun as she drank it in to recharge.

Of all the dumbass, rookie mistakes! She'd managed to coexist with the living, breathing Maitlands for...how long had it even been? Five years, maybe ten? But at their best she'd never felt such vibrant energy coming from them. Maybe it was because she'd left them alone, maybe it was because she was deteriorating, losing her cohesion, wasting away, going cuckoo being stuck in this stupid hill...

Any minute now the bureaucrats would make up their pencil-pushing minds and she'd be getting a citation or -

"So I hear you had another little incident with the living last night."

- a visit from her caseworker.

In a choppy, fake old-man accent he continued, "Eat hundred souls, then you demon become."

Shifting to one side, she leveled a dreary stare at the slim Asian graduate student in a bloodstained lab coat leaning against the car door. "Cut the bullshit, Osamu. How would I even get a hundred souls up here?"

He bent down to look at her over the thick plastic rims of his coke bottle glasses, raising an eyebrow. "I see you've been thinking about it, though." Eying the plaid shirt disapprovingly, he added, " The Maitlands would never see it coming."

She rearranged her scarf to cover more of the, frankly embarrassing, plaid pattern. "I was going to give it back."

"And I'm here, that's three. After that, you could probably make it down to the bridge, and absorb Mr. Coolidge. How far away is the cemetery from here? How close is a hospital? I bet there are some ghosts there."

"For god's sake, are you trying to talk me into it, or out of it?" she cried.

"I'm not your friend. I'm not here to hold your hand. If you fuck up your afterlife, that's your problem."

Grabbing his lapels, she yanked him down to her level. "If I took what's left of your life force, I think it would be your problem too, asshole," she hissed. "Do you want to end up in the Lost Souls Room?"

He peeled her fingers off his coat one by one with a put-upon expression. "At least I wouldn't have to do paperwork anymore. I thought I was done with advising arrogant little know-it-all punks when I hit that pavement. File for the proper fiend license, take a poltergeist correspondence course, do whatever the hell you want, start eating bugs a la Renfield for all I care, but - " He paused significantly.

"But?" she prompted.

"Leave the breather alone."

"There won't be another 'incident', but straight-up haunting is perfectly legal! I want him out of the house!"

"Fantastic. Let the Maitlands do it. They care more about _the house_ than you do."

She bolted upright. "The Maitlands? ! You've gotta be kidding. Those amateurs couldn't scare a fly away!"

Perching on top of the car door, he took off his glasses and pointed at her with them. "Listen, kid. This isn't coming from me. I've given up on you. You're a lost cause. You'll never fucking straighten up and act like a human being. I would've just jotted out a memo saying 'shame on you,' only using fewer words. This is an order from higher up. They don't want you messing around with Benjamin Joos."

"Why?" she asked suspiciously, laying her other hand over her flushed fingers hidden in a plaid cuff.

"You know why. The dead can't go around killing the living! It's chaos, and more than that, it causes so much goddamn paperwork."

"I'm not going to kill him!"

"Oh, you'll just suck his essence out through his chest, and the heart attack will be a coincidence."

"It was an accident!"

"Keep telling yourself that. All I know is, the Department of Destiny is telling you to lay off or bad things happen, such as me having to fill out all the forms for karmic entanglement. There are 337 of them! You know the fate whackos have to do everything in...quint-plicate...there isn't even a word for it. Paperwork, times five." His voice got very quiet and intense, his almond-shaped eyes narrowed into angry slits. "Don't do this to me, Lydia. Think of all the paperwork."

She slouched back down in the seat. "Hmph."

He invaded her personal space until she looked him in the eye. "Stay away from Joos," he enunciated very clearly. Then he was gone.

She kicked the stick shift out of park with the oversized combat boots she'd lifted from the other male resident of the house, whom she was apparently supposed to avoid now. The car lurched in place against the wooden blocks under its back wheels.

A shout rang out from the front door of the house. "Hey! What the hell are you doing to Doomie?"

And speak of the devil. This just wasn't her day.

Lydia hauled herself up to sit on top of the trunk, swinging the boots against the seat back of the front and only row. Thud thud thud. "You named your car _Doomie_?" she asked, her eyebrows raised and a tiny smirk playing with the corner of her mouth.

That was seriously the last straw! Benjamin had had a hell of a day so far, and it wasn't even nine o'clock. He'd woken up too fucking early with a really agonizing bruised feeling in his chest that throbbed with his heartbeat, and as if that wasn't bad enough, he'd checked under the pillow to make sure it all hadn't been a weird-ass dream. It wasn't. Not only was his phone totally caput, his new mattress had a lovely hole burnt straight through it.

After that, all he wanted was some goddamn breakfast liberally spiced with painkillers, but nooooo. Everywhere he turns around there's that Tweedle-dee from last night with her '80s perm and Tweedle-dumbass, apparently her husband. Great. Out of all the perfectly normal houses in the world, he had to go ahead and pick the actually haunted one. He'd checked, it should have been fine! No gory murders on record, not even a little old grandma passing away and getting eaten by her cats. If the former owners didn't even have the decency to pass on, why weren't they mucking around in that stupid river they drowned in, or in the cemetery with their damn bodies? He called that just plain rude.

And just to put the crappy icing on the cake of misery, how did they go about haunting the place? Ripping their damn faces off and posing like wax figures in Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors. Like he gave a shit. He tried simply ignoring the harmless morons, but then they started bickering about whether he could see them or not. Hello headache.

It turned out he didn't actually have any painkillers yet. Nor had he actually gone grocery shopping for real, substantive food yesterday. Cue throwing on enough clothes not to be arrested for indecent exposure, being frustrated by an inability to find his favorite shoes, and heading out.

Only to see the motherfucking craziest ghost he'd ever had the misfortune of running across screwing with his car. His goddamn car! Was nothing sacred? !

He stormed down the front steps.

She leapt to her feet on the back of the car and shouted, "Not one step closer or I'll scuff the paint job!" She raised one foot and threateningly aimed the steel toecap down at the trunk lid.

He skidded to a stop, swearing. "Let's not do anything rash, okay?" he pleaded. His short, disheveled golden blonde hair shone in the pale morning light, which also illuminated a much handsomer face than the twisting shadows the cell phone screen had revealed. He was also younger than she had guessed, having been fooled by the deep creases marked on his forehead and between his perpetually scowling eyebrows. Late twenties, she revised her opinion. Maybe thirty.

"What the hell, that worked?" she muttered, letting her foot fall. He sprang forward and she immediately lifted it again, higher.

Throwing up his hands, he took a step backwards. "I surrender, alright? I fucking give up! ...Are those my boots?" Slowly examining her from toe to head, he began complaining. "What kind of goddamn hobo-hipster steals a man's own footwear and uses it to hold his car hostage? Have you no shame?"

"What did you just call me? !"

"You heard me! A hobo-hipster! Plaid shirt, pretentious scarf, and squatting on my property! Do you think this is the set of 'Rent' or somethin'?"

Oh. No. He. Didn't. Her hands twisted her black lace scarf into a noose-tight rope. Out of all the things she had managed to keep from her mortal life, and there weren't many, he insults one of her scarves? "I'm going to make you wish you had never been born!" she vowed.

Considering the last time only Babs' clueless interference had saved him from who knows what, he watched in fascinated horror as inky black poured out over her brown irises. Phantom wind rippled through her hair and the stark white of her skin seemed to vibrate in and out of focus. Briefly, he considered apologizing. Nah.

Lydia roughly pushed up her sleeves and pointed her marked hand down at the Beetle, shouting something that was rendered incomprehensible by the sudden revving of the car's engine. In the midst of a dazzling explosion, what had been ordinary headlights blinked for the very first time, and what had been a bumper grinned widely.

The Dragster of Doom turned to look at Benjamin and beeped his horn demandingly, starting to roll forward. When the poor man didn't get the hint, the car tossed him into the driver's seat before taking off down the road at breakneck speed.

All that was left behind on the driveway was a forlorn lace scarf tangled around a pair of combat boots.

Having watched the scene below without even being sure what she was watching it _with_, she wanted to know why the car that was supposed to run him over a little bit, maybe break a leg or something, started acting like a freaking puppy-on-wheels. That was a lot less Stephen King's "Christine" and a lot more Disney's "Herbie" than she was aiming for.

What the hell just happened? She hadn't meant for the car to come alive, or animate, or whatever. She definitely hadn't meant to get pasted across the scenery as a thoroughly discorporated blob of protoplasm by the blowback of the massive surge caused by channeling her mojo through the lingering energy in her hand. If she still had the necessary organs to do so, she'd probably be having a panic attack.

She really needed to get her act together.

Fast.


End file.
